I have no idea how it began, but I spent most of my early life convinced that I was massively overweight. As a child, as a teenager, and then through most of my early adult life I was certain that I was far above average weight and that there was little I could do about changing that. Everyone said it, even my parents said the same, so of course I believed it. I didn’t particularly care at the time so I never found myself with eating problems or over-dieting to try to fix it, but I did think it was just one of those things that I was going to have to put up with.

I don’t know why my family used to insist that I was so fat, especially as when the photo above was taken I was about half the size of my father and my mother was never skinny either. Amongst my school friends I was very average (if a bit taller than most) and yet I was the one always described as “massive”. When I started work there were larger and smaller people than me, but again it was always hinted that I was at the larger end of the scale. In fact the only group of people that never said anything about me being “large” were my naked friends and contacts, but they never said anything about me being averagely sized either so there was nothing there to balance out the messaging I was getting from everywhere else.

Looking back, however, that messaging was clearly a load of rubbish. The photo at the top of this article was me aged about 17 or 18, and these days I can see that I was a pretty normal size at the time, possibly even a bit smaller than the average. And yet it took me until I was in my mid 40s (and by then actually overweight) to realise that they were all wrong.

But if I wasn’t bothered by it, what was the problem?

I made decisions – both conscious and subconscious – based on my belief that I was overweight. I was never very good at sport back then, but I never really tried either, as I felt that I would have to lose a lot of weight before I could even start and that put me right off. I was never very confident around girls as I knew they all just saw me as some sort of blob, so I blustered a lot and made out that I wasn’t interested. I paid no attention to what I ate, as why did it matter if I put on a few pounds more. I basically had a very low impression of myself.

Then when I reached my 40s I started to have a few health problems, and because I already saw myself as overweight I didn’t notice when the change in my health made me actually put on a huge amount of body fat. I gained 4 stone in a couple of years, and yet somehow I never even noticed. I assumed (yes, really) that my clothes no longer fit because they had shrunk, not because I had grown, and so I ignored a potentially problematic health issue until it was starting to become much more significant.

Friends didn’t say anything about my weight, family never mentioned that I was twice the size I used to be, work colleagues never said anything. The culture of “all bodies are beautiful” was starting to take hold at that point, and everyone was being encouraged to believe that being massively overweight was no-one else’s business. So no-one said anything, and I never noticed. Believe it or not, the only way I realised that something had gone very wrong was that the horse I used to ride eventually started to protest as she could no longer carry me. I checked my riding style, took extra lessons, and eventually had to realise that it was not her it was me. I was a very different shape to when I had been when I started riding her, and I had gone from 14st (89kg) up to 19.5st (124kg) without realising anything was wrong.

These days I am more active than I have been at any other point in my life; I teach dance (that was an unexpected career change), do a lot of building and landscaping work, and I walk all over the local countryside. But despite that I am finding it very hard to shift the weight. At 59 years old I am a lot smaller now than I was at my peak, but the abdominal fat is persistent, and that is the area that is likely to cause the most long-term health issues so I am keen to try to get it to go. But that is also the hardest area to shift once established so I have a lot of work to do there.

A misplaced or wrong body self-image will affect everyone very differently. I never became embarrassed about how I looked or tried to hide my body away, but my complete lack of realisation about what was happening to me had a significant impact on my health. As I think back on those times I do wonder what people thought of what was happening to me, especially at nude beaches and clubs where the same people would have seen me semi-regularly without any clothes to get in the way over the whole “expansion phase” of my life. Did they think I was fat at the start and never notice the change? Did they see me inflate, think “wow… what is happening to him?” but greet me with a “Hey, you look well”? Did no-one think “I wonder if he is okay?” If people rapidly lose a lot of weight the first thought that comes to anyone these days is “cancer?” and they often subtly try to ask if everything is okay. But if people rapidly expand, what do people do? Does anyone think to ask? Or are we so scared of causing offence that we have become blind to upward size changes?

My fluctuating size never really affected my body confidence. I have always been happy to go to a nude beach or be photographed or drawn naked by anyone who asks, although right now I would like to be a bit thinner so my weight isn’t the first thing people see. It has however affected my physical capabilities, and I am less flexible than I should be, I have joint damage that will not have been helped by carrying around an extra 20+ kg, and I have internal issues that are being managed but would have been caught a lot earlier had I realised what was going on.

Humans are strange creatures. If you point at a white stone and tell a person that it’s black they will think you are crazy. But if everyone tells them the white stone is black they will assume that they are the one that is crazy. The same goes for how we look. If people tell someone they are ugly they will eventually believe it. If people tell a person they are fat they will accept that regardless of how underweight they might be. Body shaming is a bad thing and causes lasting long-term damage.

However we do also have to be careful not to go too far the other way. Tell a thin person they are fat and you will do damage, but telling a formerly average-sized person who has just doubled in weight that they “look so healthy” will do plenty of damage as well.

We need to find a comfortable ground for truth when talking to people. Naturists, nudists, and naked people talk about body honestly and being who we are without judgement, but we also need to add in some responsibility for checking on our friends from time to time. If things change, find a way to make sure people are okay. Because they may well not have noticed.